Blackadder:…What is this?
Baldrick:Oh, I’m surprised you’ve forgotten, my lord.
Blackadder:I haven’t forgotten; it’s a rhetorical question.
Baldrick: [looking at him] No, it’s a potato.
Blackadder: To you it’s a potato, to me it’s a potato. But to Sir Walter Bloody Raleigh it’s country estates, fine carriages,
and as many girls as his tongue can cope with. He’s making
a fortune out of the things; people are smoking them,
building houses out of them… They’ll be eating them next.
Except that he does refer to potatoes. When Gollum asks about taters, Sam replies “Po-ta-toes”, and I’m pretty sure that there’s also reference to the Ol’ Gaffer growing potatoes. He did, however, remove all references to tomatoes: In the original editions of The Hobbit, Gandalf asks for “cold chicken and tomatoes” for supper, wheras in later editions, that’s “cold chicken and pickles”.
Even before that we read that The Gaffer was recognized by all in the vicinity as an authority on the growing of “roots”, especially potatoes.
But there’s no mention of sour cream and chives. 
God, I’m quoting this as a Southern Baptist does the Bible. I must need a life or something.
I believe that part of the reason for the Irish potato famine was that after the potato was introduced, the Irish population exploded and then with the failure of the crop that increased population could not be sustained.
As an aside the reason that peppers are called peppers (and not just in English; the same or similar words are used for black pepper and green peppers in several languages) is that Columbus was expected to bring pepper back from Asia and instead he brought back capsicum that he called “vegetable pepper”.
I knew someone was going to mention this…
Cecil has a column somewhere about the Irish and the potato famine, I think.
It was quite a surprise to me to discover that sheep, cattle, pigs, chickens, and horses were not native to the Americas. Actually, I knew about the horses a long time, but I think I was an adult when it hit me about the rest.
[nitpick]
Actually, horses are native to North America - they evolved here first, emigrated to Asia and Europe during one of the periods where a Bering Land Bridge was in existance, then died out in the Americas. When the Europeans brought them over they were re-introducing a species that had been gone for several thousand years from it’s place of origin.
[/nitpick]
According to legend, they were first planted down the end of the road where I grew up. This is in a town called Kenilworth, pretty close to the castle.
There’s also the legend about how the Russian Tsar wanted to introduce potatoes to the peasant’s diet. He tried ordering them to grow potatotes, but they refused, the plants mysteriously died, etc. So he built a big fence around his personal potato patch and declared that only the aristocracy was to eat potatoes, they were forbidden to the peasants. Naturally, plants were then stolen and propagated thoughout Russia.
For some odd reason growing potatoes didn’t really catch on in Sweden until people found that they could use them for making vodka. :dubious: